As a presidential hopeful, Giuliani's authoritarian streak is as strong as ever. He defends the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. He endorses the President's power to arrest American citizens, declare them enemy combatants and hold them without access to a lawyer or a judge. He thinks the President has "the inherent authority to support the troops" even if Congress were to cut off war funding, a claim of presidential authority so sweeping that even Bush and his supporters have not tried to make it.

Matt Yglesias adds:

He's also in many ways probably the least libertarian candidate in the race -- someone who pretty clearly doesn't believe in any kind of principled restrictions on the power of the state, and someone who's extremely eager to see the state deploy extreme violence as the preferred means of achieving policy goals.